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Judge Rejects Google Deal Over Email Scanning (fortune.com)
A federal judge in San Francisco slammed a legal settlement that proposed to pay $2.2 million to lawyers, but nothing to consumers who had the contents of their email scanned by Google without their knowledge or permission. From a report: In a 6-page order, Judge Lucy Koh told Google and class action attorneys the proposed settlement was insufficient, in part because it failed to clearly tell consumers what the search giant had done. "This notice is difficult to understand and does not clearly disclose the fact that Google intercepts, scans and analyzes the content of emails sent by non-Gmail users to Gmail users for the purpose of creating user profiles of the Gmail users to create targeted advertising for the Gmail users," Koh wrote.
...and only the lawyers get rich. When will people learn?
Heck, they got themselves a pay day and didn't even get a clear ANSWER for the consumers.
You can get rich if you own a politician, but you have to be rich to buy one in the first place.
Oh, GMail is free? Hmmm...
This is a horseshit waste of money and legal resources to enrich lawyers. Even before I signed up for GMail in beta (yes that long ago) it was well known that GMail was using the contents of mail to display targeted ads. That's why it was being offered as a service. It's in the TOS.
Sorry to hear "consumers" who got a service for free are too damn stupid to realize how it's being paid for. Just wait till someone tells them how Facebook pays for itself...
The lawyers get paid, the company gets indemnified from future lawsuits, the victims get some shitty coupons.
I strongly suspect that most class action suits are engineered by the companies themselves. They get free immunity for a relatively small payout to some lawyers.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.